Leading article: This obscenity is a wake-up call for Europe

It ought to inspire shame throughout Europe that dozens of African immigrants spent an entire night in the open sea while Maltese and Libyan officials, aware of their plight, argued over whose responsibility they were.

It may not. Even the most powerful images of stranded or dead illegal migrants seem to have lost the power to shock. People in the Canary Islands, or on Lampedusa, off Sicily, have become depressingly inured to the sight of the bloated corpses of sub-Saharan Africans washed up on their shores.

Related articles

• Millions who risk death for a better life
• Europe's shame
• Search the news archive for more stories

The consensus is that at least 6,000 have perished in the past few years, trying to cross the Mediterranean. This is only the number of bodies reported found; it does not cover thousands more who have gone missing.

It would be convenient but pointless to blame Malta or Italy for this situation, however badly the Maltese have behaved over the latest case. Europe as a whole has handled growing south-north migration in a feeble, cowardly manner, and the main strategy of each country has been to pass the buck to another. Countries further north - the destination of most would-be migrants - put pressure on "frontline" Mediterranean states to tighten the flow, and then blame them for backsliding. Remember the outcry against Spain when it granted an amnesty in 2005 to half a million illegal immigrants?

Mediteranean countries in turn put pressure on Mahgreb states to halt sub-Saharans and Eritreans in their tracks and prevent them from reaching their ports. What happens? Last Christmas, Morocco simply dumped 450 of them without water in the desert on the Algerian border near Oujda.

We need to stop passing the buck and admit that tightening the barriers round Fortress Europe is a hopeless and ineffective strategy. Soaring populations and global warming, leading to desertification, as well as the vast and growing discrepancies in incomes between those living north and south of the Straits of Gibraltar mean that the flow of migrants will increase.

We need to find more positive ways to address this challenge. The EU has a good idea to open job centres in North Africa, alerting local people to the - faint - possibility of entering Europe without the "help" of traffickers. Some Spanish charities are investing in job-creation in villages of Morocco, to persuade young men that they can build decent livelihoods at home.

These are small examples of imaginative thinking, but we need many more. What we must not do is continue to look away, hoping someone else will deal with this crisis. If we do, we must brace ourselves for yet more of these degrading and outrageous incidents.